Wind and Rushing Water
by VampirePam
Summary: James Bond/Q. There are words James will not say - not even to Q. Especially not to Q. **Major Spoilers for Skyfall**


_"Sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua" - Catullus LXX. 3-4_

They are the last words his mother ever says to him, the night she shoves him in the secret passage. Don't make me go, Mummy. Please don't make me go in there alone. He's always been afraid of enclosed spaces.

But she tells him he has to be brave, so in he goes - down, down, down into a world of cold darkness and rough stone. It's when he reaches the bottom of the stairs that she calls out his name. Then it's just three little words before she's gone, the light with her.

There are words he will not say.

He says them to Vesper twice, just twice. The first time they are tangled together on the beach, waves lapping around their ankles, and he just knows. He knows that he would die for her, kill for her, and most importantly, give the only life he has ever really known for her, and gladly. Compared to that, the words are only an afterthought, an inevitable consequence of the feeling. They fall easily from his lips, carried by the wind to her ears.

The second time they choke him, only to be swallowed immediately afterward by the water. Where she is now, not even the wind can bring them to her.

There are words he will not say.

He never says them to M - he can see her even now, arching a brow at him and murmuring some admonishment to stop being so damn sloppy before returning her attention to her paperwork - but in the end, it all comes out the same. It is as if he has thought the words too loudly or too often, and then she too is gone.

There are words he will not say.

He throws himself into his work after Skyfall, after M. For three months, it's one mission after another, the details all blurring together until he's stopped knowing or caring whom he's fighting or why. Through it all, Q is his only constant - the single stationary point of light he finds himself needing to focus on more and more to keep from spinning completely out of control.

It is only when he's ordered to take a week's leave by Mallory - he will never be able to think of him as M. There is only one person with that name, and she is no longer in any position to be giving orders - that he finally faces what he's lost. Whom he's lost.

He doesn't know why Q comes to his apartment that night, and doesn't ask. He's in no mood for talking, and for once the quartermaster obliges him. Q says nothing, just walks to where James is standing at the window - eyes red-rimmed, hand clutching a tumbler of the scotch he drinks when a martini will simply not suffice - and methodically begins to run those long, clever fingers through his hair.

James almost thinks them, then. With his defenses lowered, the treasonous words make their way unbidden from the dark recesses of his subconscious to whisper themselves in his ear. As he pivots to crash his lips wildly down on Q's, he ruthlessly banishes them from his mind. These are words he will not say.

So he does not say them when he leaves for Paris, and Q is tangled in his starched, white sheets, pale skin shining impossibly bright in the moonlight - a lone statue left in the ruins of a Hellenistic temple long abandoned. The ghost of a kiss on Q's cheek, a few fingers brushing his dark hair back from his eyes, and James is gone, leaving only silence in his wake.w

And he does not say them when he returns from Baghdad to what is becoming a familiar sort of text message: _Needn't bother going to your place; I had the locks changed. Don't sulk - you're out of vermouth anyway. Oh, and do pick up some grated parmesan on your way here. Haven't eaten in a couple days, so I'm making spaghetti. It's about all I can cook, but I'm frightfully good._ It's nothing fancy - although Q's intel about the quality of the spaghetti is flawless, as always - but it's warm and makes Q's lips taste like tomato sauce.

He does not even say them when a supposedly straightforward mission in Turkey goes completely, horrifically wrong, and he spends six agonizing days being shot full of electricity while the same questions are shouted at him in angry Turkish, over and over and over again. In the end, it is Q who finds him, as he has promised he always will - a promise James finds himself clinging to when things get darkest.

But when he is finally returned to the safety of his flat, with his quartermaster's arms around his neck, immersing him in soft wool and mint aftershave, James can't keep the words inside anymore. He breathes them into Q's neck, imprints them into the skin beneath his thin cardigan with a grip tight enough to bruise, beats them out in a frantic tattoo with the tips of his fingers.

There are words he will not say. But he thinks, he prays, he hopes desperately, that with all his powers of information gathering, Q can hear them anyway.

_"But what a woman says to her lover should be written on the wind and rushing water."_


End file.
